DataSift Defines a Data-Driven Customer Experience

Social media data informs many marketing-related activities, from ensuring that a company’s target audience knows about key products to updating executives about campaign strategy and performance. But social media data is just part of the equation. Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, VP of Marketing at DataSift, addresses several challenges that CMO’s face as they build their marketing strategies, from extracting customer insights from the expanding data universe to the never-ending quest for ROI, and provides sound recommendations to help CMOs reap the rewards of data-driven programs.

The Expanding Data Universe

Marketers are now allocating more of their budgets to social, mobile and marketing analytics. In five years’ time, social media spending is predicted to account for 24 percent of total marketing budgets, and marketing analytics is expected to grow to 11 percent of the total marketing budget in the next three years.

In a multichannel, multi-screen and multi-device world, marketers can’t drive loyalty, deliver a seamless consumer experience or engage key audiences based on assumptions. However, marketers still face challenges using these capabilities and proving ROI from investments.

Proving ROI is a never-ending challenge

Data must directly translate to leads generated, conversions and other business metrics to prove its worth. Most social networks provide advertisers with a number of click throughs, views or stats. Marketers must track via code to determine if a customer took a specific action. Did the landing page visit result in a sale? Did the potential customer drop off somewhere within the marketing funnel, and if so, where? Is the wrong content reaching the wrong people, resulting in failed leads? Are the wrong people coming through the marketing funnel?

The consumer decision journey is now subject to many different moments of influence, making it harder than ever to analyze. There’s far more data and fragmentation – Web, social and mobile – than ever before. Big insights and data science are now stepping into the limelight.

Audience Insights, Intelligence and Data Science

Machine learning technologies now enable companies to gain nuanced insights into market interest and can surface customer intent to churn, purchase and more. At an audience level, anonymized and aggregated social data can provide CMOs with insights that enable them to improve marketing efficiency, spot new trends, identify new audiences and more.

On the flipside, social logins have become standard and provide businesses with small insights into consumer interests, preferences and potential product needs. Social intelligence from the data enables CMOs to question assumptions, formulate hypotheses and fine-tune the calculations. Ultimately, helping to improve and prove social ROI.

Data-driven CMOs are primed to reap data’s rewards. Data is where the “rubber” meets the “customer and purchase” road, and a strong data strategy is imperative to overall company innovation, profitability and success.